The long view

Our annual double-month issue that brackets the holidays takes the long view this year--26,000 years long. That's the time the Earth needs to do its impersonation of the one-second wobble of a spinning toy top beginning to slow down (see "Turn, Turn, Turn," by Donald Goldsmith, page 20). One consequence of the Earth's slow wobble--more properly known as precession--is that the North Star (Polaris) was not always, and will not always be, the navigator's friendly beacon of the north. Goldsmith reminds historians, archaeologists--and re-enactors--that if they hope to evoke the ancient world, they must remember that the Egyptians, the Greeks, and their contemporaries looked on a sky whose north pole was closer to the rather dim star Thuban, in the constellation Draco, the dragon, than to our familiar Polaris. Our descendants in the 140th century will find north easily by looking for Vega, a bright "summer" star usually too low on the horizon this time of year to be visible (at reasonable hours of the night!) at mid-northern latitudes.

By those standards, the birthdays whose 300th anniversaries we're gearing up for in this issue are recent history. Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon, the two leading "natural historians" of the eighteenth century, were both born in 1707. As Richard Conniff tells the tale ("Happy Birthday, Linnaeus," page 42), the two could hardly have been more divergent in background, or scientifically more at odds: Linnaeus, the provincial, self-promoting Swede, pious and gregarious, the man with one great idea whose name resonates in "Linnaean" taxonomy today; and Buffon, the sophisticated Frenchman, politically adroit, confidante of the rich and powerful, brimming with ideas, yet now virtually forgotten. Each was the other's greatest enemy. Linnaeus will get by far the Panthera leo's share of the attention in this year's celebrations; but Buffon, Conniff argues, deserves at least equal honors for his scientific depth and his adherence to the evidence from nature.

To me and maybe to you, it's comforting, in the bleak midwinter, to contemplate the life that goes on ceaselessly beneath the frozen soil. In his article "Dig It!" (page 36), Robert R. Dunn takes us on an eye-opening voyage into that flourishing underground ecosystem, where he finds an astonishing diversity of burrowing activity. Dunn also reports that biologists have found wonderfully creative ways to study life in the soil. One investigator put marine worms in a kind of transparent gelatin, which approximated the density of sediment; then she flooded the gelatin with light. The force made by the worms at various points along their bodies as they burrowed through the gelatin caused differences in how the light was reflected. So by watching the worms and their "light shows," she could tell a lot about the ways they move.

Neil deGrasse Tyson returns to us in our next (February 2007) issue with a fascinating tale of neutrinos, the "little neutral ones" from the depths of space that ceaselessly zip through our bodies. Until then, we wish you a joyous holiday season and a peaceful New Year.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning